From Behind the Curtain: Q&A with David Johnson, Senior Director of Engineering at VL

At Visual Lease, our Technology  team houses our Engineering and Cloud Operations groups. These teams are committed to providing the best user experience for our clients, and improving the platform along the way. From building application features to troubleshooting internal and production defects, the Technology team ensures our solution runs smoothly and effectively for all customers. 

Our new Q&A blog series, From Behind the Curtain, provides a glimpse into the lives of the people behind our software. This series features a sit-down with different members of our team who will share unique insights and perspectives about their roles at Visual Lease.  

Last week, we spoke to Todd Worms, Manager of Customer Support at Visual Lease. He discussed his position and what clients can expect when working with his team. To read Todd’s interview, click here. 

Question #1: Joe Fitzgerald, SVP of Lease Market Strategy

 Tell me a little about the Visual Lease Technology team. 

Answer #1: David Johnson, Senior Director of Engineering

 Our Technology group is comprised of our Engineering team, which is organized into several smaller, cross-functional teams. These teams design, develop and test new features and products in two-week iterations called “Sprints.” In addition, they find and fix defects while striving to innovate our platform to best meet the future needs of our clients. Also, in the Technology group is our Cloud Operations team. This team is fully responsible for our hosted infrastructure, as well as our environment monitoring, performance, provisioning and deployment processes and tools. Additionally, CloudOps is always available to investigate and resolve any hosting issues. 

Question #2: Joe Fitzgerald, SVP of Lease Market Strategy

 How does the team ensure quality while developing features in such short iterations? 

Answer #2: David Johnson, Senior Director of Engineering

 In the last year, we have made a significant effort to drive quality into all our processes in a “Shift-Left” initiative. This initiative has resulted in code review of all changes, hundreds of automated tests running daily and manual regression and performance tests executed every two weeks. We also focused heavily in 2020 on resolving all known defects. The combination of frequent, automated tests and low numbers of defects has enabled us to shift from a quarterly release to a monthly release with robust quality.    

Question #3: Joe Fitzgerald, SVP of Lease Market Strategy

 You mentioned innovation, can you share a little more about that? 

Answer #3: David Johnson, Senior Director of Engineering

 In the last year, we have successfully migrated from a private cloud vendor to AWS – the leading and most secure public cloud provider! Our CloudOps is fully scaled and ramped up on all related technologies. They have put in place comprehensive monitoring and automation for operational consistency.   

Moving to AWS has paved the way for several future innovative steps. In addition to growing our engineering team in size and capabilities, we have undertaken several important projects that have or will soon provide benefits to our customers. A few months ago, we introduced a new API along with our new Integrations Hub application. We are progressively rebuilding our application using new technologies and following scalable design patterns to dramatically improve performance and provide a modern user interface, as well as advanced BI capabilities in the future. Stay tuned for future updates in these areas!